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Just a few of the numbers related to what is rapidly becoming the biggest federal disaster response effort in history:

• 39 FEMA disaster medical assistance teams sent to staging areas near affected areas.


• 40 Medical shelters being set up by the Health and Human Services Department.


• 50 Military helicopters mobilized to assist FEMA in response efforts.


• 500 Beds in mobile hospital DoD is deplying in New Orleans.


• 800 Military personnel deployed to assist the Red Cross in setting up shelters.
  
• 1,000 People already rescued by the Coast Guard.


• 1,700 Trailer trucks mobilized by FEMA to move supplies into position.


• 1.5 million Military Meals-Ready-to-Eat available for distribution to victims if necessary.


• 13.4 million Liters of water delivered to the region under the auspices of the Transportation Department.

Blogger Mudville Gazette has a good rundown on the extent of military involvement in Katrina relief efforts.

Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Ala., says it's just not true that members of Congress get cushy retirement packages. He tries to make the case in his column in the Atmore Advance that he's just like any other civil servant, paying into the Federal Employee Retirement System and Social Security. It's "completely untrue," he adds, "that members of Congress, during their retirement, will receive 100 percent of their full salary."

A partial list of federal facilities and operations affected by Katrina, with links to information about their operating status:

• Keesler Air Force Base, Miss.


• NASA's Stennis Space Center and Lockheed Martin's Michoud Assembly Facility


• Defense Information Systems Agency-Slidell


• JASS Career Managment System, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command


• New Orleans Passport Agency






Got links to information on any other facilities? Send them to me and I'll add them here.


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The USA Freedom Corps has a message for those wanting to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina: Send your money, but leave the direct relief efforts to the professionals.

President Bush is cutting short his vacation to head back to Washington to deal with the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina. I realize he's essentially required to do this for image purposes, but the stated rationale--that, as he put it, "we have a lot of work to do"--is questionable. If the president needs to be in Washington to personally oversee relief efforts, then his administration's got bigger problems to deal with than a hurricane. In fact, there's a fine line between showing leadership and getting in the way of those further down the chain of command. White House spokesman Scott McClellan says Bush will chair a meeting Wednesday of a task force on the disaster. Let's hope that isn't a group of people dragged away from real relief efforts to put on a show at the White House.

Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher apparently doesn't care much for the merit system. He says he'll pardon those members of his administration under investigation for violating laws on hiring state employees. Breaking such laws, he says, is like violating state fishing regulations--just not that big a deal.

Agencies like Commerce, Agriculture and Interior are just fine, Supreme Court nominee John Roberts said way back when, but they ought not to have any employees toting guns and making arrests. The New York Times details how Roberts made the Reagan administration's case for limiting federal law enforcement powers to the Justice and Treasury departments. The administration's position, Roberts wrote "will doubtless be viewed as an effort by Justice and Treasury to protect their 'turf,' but it is true that the proliferation of criminal law enforcement authority throughout the government is a dangerous trend that should be halted if not reversed."

Here's a partial list of the agencies that have stepped in to help with Hurricane Katrina relief efforts:

• Federal Emergency Management Agency


• Army Corps of Engineers


• Environmental Protection Agency


• Coast Guard


• Food and Nutrition Service


• Natural Resources Conservation Service


• Health and Human Services Department


• Transportation Department


• Defense Department's Northern Command


• National Guard


• Occupational Safety and Health Administration

Here's how the Missouri congressional delegation reacted to the bad news they got last week from the base closure commission. Not surprisingly, they have a different point of view than the folks up in South Dakota when it comes to whether the commission serves the national interest. In the Missourians' view, you probably won't be surprised to learn, what's bad for the Show-Me State is bad for the country.

As Hurricane Katrina whips through the southeastern United States, here's a good read for those of us out of harm's way: Beth Dickey's piece from our June 1 issue on the federal government's Hurricane Hunters. And yeah, they were out over the weekend, riding herd on Katrina.

I've been watching the base closure committee hearings on C-SPAN this week. Two thoughts:

• This is government at its best, isn't it? You can say what you want about the whole process being the result of elected officials' inability to get beyond their parochial interests, but it's a process that really works. It provides fair, thorough, utterly serious and completely transparent consideration of all of the factors that come into play in undertaking the painfully necessary work of reducing defense infrastructure.








• It's funny to watch the politicians who were successful in getting the panel to change the Pentagon's recommendations to close bases in their states get up to crow about their victories afterward. Invariably, they declare that the commission didn't just do what they wanted, but made the "right decision for the country." Funny, I doubt they'd be saying that if the commission decided it was time for their base to shut down.

The folks at Sandia National Laboratory are theorizing that dust from asteroids may have a bigger effect on the weather here on Earth than previously believed. The story of how they gathered the evidence to support this conclusion is a small but powerful tale of interagency cooperation. On Sept. 3, 2004, the Defense Department's space-based infrared sensors detected an asteroid about 10 meters wide, at an altitude of 75 kilometers, descending off the coast of Antarctica. Visible-light sensors built by Sandia picked up the intruder as it turned into a fireball 56 kilometers above Earth. Then five infrasound stations--used by Los Alamos National Laboratory to detect nuclear explosions anywhere in the world--registered acoustic waves from the speeding asteroid. Next, NASA’s multispectral polar orbiting sensor picked up evidence of debris formed by the disintegrating space rock. Seven and a half hours later, scientists analyzed a cloud in the upper stratosphere over Antarctica and determined that it was made up of leftover material from the asteroid.

The rehabilitation of Moammar Gadhafi continues apace. The National Nuclear Security Administration has signed an agreement to be a "sister laboratory" with Libya's National Bureau of Research and Development. Now that Libya has agreed to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction programs, I guess this is one way to make sure Gadhafi doesn't try to start them up again.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is on another federal agency's case. This time, he's hounding the FDA about the relationship between "nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy and the use of drugs prescribed by physicians to treat erectile dysfunction." What's the big deal? Well, "nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy" is, in layman's terms, blindness. The FDA says it's posted info on its Web site about the link between ED drugs and vision loss. Not good enough, says Grassley. While some people may have seen that info, he told FDA officials, "there are millions more who remain in the dark." Umm, so to speak.

In yesterday's GovExec Live! chat with Senior Executives Association President Carol Bonosaro and in Karen Rutzick's story on law enforcement officer pay, the subject of cost-of-living allowances came up. I was reminded that while federal employees get annual pay raises that at least partly serve to blunt the effects of inflation, relatively few of them get official COLAs. That is, to put it bluntly, because the government cares less about its employees' problems making ends meet than it does about being able to recruit and retain workers. I always remember what former OPM Director Constance Newman told me back in 1991, in a discussion about the then-emerging concept of locality pay. "I've tried to explain to people," she said, "this is not a cost-of-living adjustment. These increases are because as an employer we are having problems, not because you as an employee have a problem." Update: Federal Times happens to have a story today about employees in Alaska, Hawaii and U.S. territories--who do get COLAs--suing to get locality pay, too. The reason? Locality differentials are figured into retirement calculations, but COLAs aren't.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration must be doing something right with its new fuel economy standards for SUVs, because nobody seems to be happy with them. The Competitive Enterprise Institute says they will make the overall effort to set gas mileage guidelines "even deadlier for the millions of Americans on our nation’s highways" by leading to more traffic deaths. (Apparently, standards of any size are inherently "deadly.") The Natural Resources Defense Council, on the other hand, calls the new standards a "paltry gesture." (In their view, tough standards are the opposite of deadly--they're needed to "protect the strength and security of our country.")

With recruiting numbers falling short of goals, the Army's taking a whole new approach to marketing itself. It's not about convincing kids to join up, it's about convincing their parents to let them. Slate has the lowdown on the Army's new ad campaign.

How do you get all of the members of an international smuggling ring to show up at the same place at the same time? Today's New York Times provides the answer: Invite them to the "wedding" of two supposed American smugglers who were actually undercover agents with the FBI.

Have you ever noticed how stories about federal agencies that are successful always seem to appear during the slowest news periods of the year, like the last couple weeks of summer or that dead zone between Christmas and New Year's? Today's example: The piece on the front page of today's Post about how the Veterans Affairs has set up a model health care organization. Of course, the story's not exactly news. We were reporting about VA's successful transformation way back in the last millennium.

I hate to pick on Robert Novak, who's having a really bad summer, what with the whole Valerie Plame thing and walking off the set at CNN, but I just have to take note of his drearily cynical column today on Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., and the potential closing of Ellsworth Air Force Base in the state. Novak chastises the Bush White House for failing to back up Thune's efforts to keep Ellsworth open. (The first-term senator had campaigned partly on the issue of how his connections with the administration would put him in a better position than the man he beat--former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle--to keep the base open.) Novak accuses the White House of the cardinal sin of being more interested in the integrity of the base-closure process than its political ramifications. "The Bush team," he writes, "looked like tone-deaf, old-fashioned Republicans interested more in going by the book than winning elections."

Are you thinking about retirement? If so, what Web sites have you found most helpful in the planning process? We're trying to put together a comprehensive list. Share your resources with me at tshoop@govexec.com, and we'll share them with your fellow federal employees.

Donald Rumsfeld has had his share of disagreements with the media, the leaders of "Old Europe," members of Congress, his own military service leaders--well, the list goes on. So it's nice to know he's found some common ground with one of our key allies. According to the Pentagon's American Forces Information Service, "Rumsfeld, Peruvian President Share Defense Goals."

Kudos to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, for convincing Whittier Wood Products of Eugene, Ore. to voluntarily recall 2,200 of its "Chelsea pub stools" because a lack of glue used in the construction process means the chairs "could break and collapse during use, causing consumers to fall." There's enough inherent risk in using a bar stool for its intended purpose without having to worry that one will collapse under a user while he or she is stone cold sober.

There's a new blogger out there, Deep Background, who's creating a bit of a stir because he's offering his insights as a government PR professional, but doing so anonymously. A couple of thoughts on this tempest in a very small teapot:

• The reason Deep Background gives for insisting on anonymity when he started the blog is a little bizarre: "I did not want to be approached by producers of political talk shows asking me to come on their show as a government pr expert." If that's the issue, here's a solution: Just say no. No law says you have to appear on talk shows. I could see insisting on anonymity if you feared for your job, but Deep Background says he doesn't. Not wanting to be inconvenienced isn't a compelling reason for hiding behind a veil.








• This is yet another reminder that it's the people within government itself who are mainly responsible for the media's reliance on anonymous sources. Trust me, folks, most journalists don't get our kicks out of running unattributed quotes from shadowy figures. We end up doing it because so many people--even, in this case, people who are paid to speak about what their agencies are doing--insist that they won't talk unless they're not identified. In fact, not only will Deep Background not say who he is, he kicked off his blog with a post encouraging government PR people to go off the record.

In early 2003, then-TSA Administrator James Loy announced that under no circumstances would the agency engage in collective bargaining with its screeners. Now the agency has taken a very different position with regard to the screeners employed by the private companies who are now eligible to provide services at certain airports. While TSA screeners "are statutorily barred from engaging in mandatory collective bargaining," the agency's chief counsel has told the National Labor Relations Board, "it is TSA's position that this provision does not extend to aviation security screeners employed by qualified screening companies." That position has drawn the ire of the National Right To Work Foundation, which says that it is not only inconsistent, but raises "the possibility of terrorist infiltration of unions."

One thing's for sure about Supreme Court nominee John Roberts: He was a productive federal employee. Today, the National Archives and Records Administration will open 38,546 pages of presidential records from his "staff member office files." A little more than 1,700 pages will be withheld under FOIA exemptions. Here's hoping that we'll hear even more about Roberts' opinions of Michael Jackson and Prince.

AP jabs National Park Service Director Fran Mainella for seeking to hire a travel coordinator and advance person 18 months after Congress told her to cut back on the road trips. But there's less to this story than meets the eye. It's not like the Park Service is adding a new job to push more travel; it's just filling a vacancy. And, as a Park Service spokesman notes, the agency has cut 30 percent of domestic travel and 70 percent of international travel in the past year.

Seriously, I'm not obssessed with smoking. These items just keep coming over the transom this week. The Maysville (Ky.) Ledger Independent reports that efforts to cut smoking nationally could cost some federal employees in Kentucky their jobs. As the federal price support system for tobacco shuts down, USDA's Farm Service Agency is looking to close some of its 90 offices across the state. Offices within 20 miles of each other are in the crosshairs, with employees slated to be offered early retirement incentives to cut the workforce.

According to some Defense Department officials, the stress of war has driven some military service members to take up smoking. An estimated 34 percent of service members smoke, compared to the 25 percent national average, DoD reports. Smoking has actually increased in the military by 4 percent since 2002, and "it's a good suspicion" that the war on terror is to blame, says Col. Gerald Wayne Talcott of the Air Force Medical Support Agency. One other possible reason: cigarettes are cheaper in the military. To deal with that issue, the Army and Air Force Exchange Service has been ordered to restrict discounting of tobacco products to no more than 5 percent below what they would cost in the outside world.

While we're on the subject of eating, Eric Hentges, director of the Agriculture Department's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, says USDA's revised food pyramid is supposed to be "motivational," according to an AP report. That means it's more like a Nike swoosh than a specific guide to what you ought to be putting in your body. Whatever. As far as I'm concerned, any pyramid that allows General Mills to market Cocoa Puffs, Trix and Lucky Charms as health food is just fine with me.

HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt says bravo, Pizza Hut and KFC, for banning smoking in all of your restaurants. After all, he notes, "we've known for decades that smoking is bad for your health and is the leading preventable cause of death and disease." Now, about that greasy pizza and fat-laden fried chicken...

There's been much discussion of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts' judicial philosophy, politics and religious beliefs. But little has been said about his views on the operations of the executive branch--where he held positions in the Reagan and Bush administrations.
The Washington Times sheds some light today, reporting that "a review of his 48 written opinions ... shows a judge who gives the executive branch wide latitude, as long as officials don't act capriciously." For example, Roberts was in the group of nine judges who ruled unanimously that Vice President Cheney didn't have to provide the Government Accountability Office with internal records of his energy policy task force.

Roberts is "what I would call a federal-power conservative," Thomas Goldstein, founder of Goldstein & Howe, a District-based law firm that specializes in Supreme Court cases, told the paper. "I don't think he's a states-rights conservative, and I don't think he's an anti-government conservative. And this may reflect his time in the executive branch."

Fedblog's series of mini-summer vacations continues again, starting tomorrow. I'll be back on Tuesday the 16th.

Boy, the news just doesn't get any better for the folks out at Los Alamos, does it? In July, a lab employee sent a FedEx package contaminated with the deadly radioactive material Americium-241 to the Energy Department's Bettis Laboratory in Pennsylvania. Los Alamos officials acknowledged the incident publicly on July 27, but a report uncovered by the Project on Government Oversight provides additional details.

We need to move beyond dissecting frogs, people. The National Research Council has done its homework and determined that most high school science labs suck. New research into how to improve them wouldn't hurt, but there's already enough information available to start making labs better right now, says Susan Singer, chairman of the NRC's research panel that studied the issue and a biology professor at one of the nation's most esteemed institutions of higher learning, Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. (The fact that I went there is purely coincidental.)

Since the whole Virtual Case File thing didn't work out, the FBI is officially on the lookout for a new information management system that will actually work. Maybe that's why they're calling the new project Sentinel.

The hot book among Guantanamo detainees? Harry Potter, according to "Lori," a contract librarian at the facility interviewed by Washington Times. I suppose if you've got a lot of time on your hands, the hefty Potter tomes will help kill some of it. But speaking as someone who has read each of the first five books in the series out loud (to my son), I can say that the stories are great, but the prose is often, well, tortured.

I realize Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., chairman of the House Appropriations' homeland security subcommittee, is trying to make a point by slashing the budget for the Coast Guard's Deepwater project by hundreds of millions of dollars because he's not satisfied with budgetary information supplied by the agency and the Homeland Security Department. But is that really worth putting the lives of Coast Guard members at risk? Washington Times reports today that the problem of corrision on the hulls of the Coast Guard's 110-foot cutters has become so acute that many actually have holes where water pours through. Only a quarter of the Coast Guard's fast-response fleet is mission-capable, and the agency is now seeking to replace all of the boats, starting in 2007. Of course, they'll have to get through Rogers first.

AP takes a long look at the story of Bunnatine Greenhouse, the Army Corps of Engineers' principal contracting official, now under fire for challenging billions of dollars of Iraq-related contracts to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root. Money quote: "I took an oath of office. I took those words that I was going to protect the interests of my government and my country. So help me God. And nobody. Has the right. To take away my privilege. To serve my government. Nobody."

National Journal's Brian Friel has an amusing little anecdote in the magazine's "Inside Washington" section this week about Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. We're all in the same publishing family here, so I'm going to reprint the whole thing:

What would you do if your teen who normally got As and Bs came home with a surprising D in science? Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, around the time she was being confirmed by the Senate in January, marched right up to her daughter's public middle school in Northern Virginia and met with her teachers. By the next grading period, her daughter Grace had raised her science grade to an A. Spellings told the story at a National Council of La Raza meeting in July, and again at a teachers conference in June, to illustrate the importance of parental involvement. "Afterward, my daughter said, 'I hated that you were in my school,' " Spellings recounted. "I told her, 'You get your grades up, and I'll get out of your school.' " Staying out of her mom's speeches is no doubt further encouragement for Grace to keep her grades up. Like, oh my gosh, how embarrassing!

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is ratcheting up the rhetoric in its effort to convince the Navy to reconsider its decision to demolish 39 historic structures at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida. “The Pensacola Naval Air Station National Historic Landmark District is the Independence Hall of our nation’s naval history," says National Trust President Richard Moe. "To lose the heart of this irreplaceable historic district at the hand of the U.S. Navy itself is incomprehensible." The structures on the base were damaged in last year's Hurricane Ivan.

Is the on-time performance of airlines getting better or worse? It depends on how you look at the Bureau of Transportation Statistics' latest figures. The airlines' 75.2 percent on-time percentage in June was an improvement over June 2004’s 73 percent, but below May 2005’s 83.7 percent. The airlines reported that 8.23 percent of their June flights were held up by aviation system delays, compared with 5.65 percent in May.

In a speech yesterday in Grapevine, Texas, President Bush outlined a whole bunch of things his government is doing: Fighting terrorists, developing energy policy, enacting legal reforms and negotiating free trade agreements, to name a few. But when it comes to the big stuff, he said, Uncle Sam is a heartless old man. "We understand that government -- government can't love," Bush said. "Government can pass law; government can hand out money; but government cannot put heart -- hope in a person's heart or a sense of purpose in a person's life. That's done when a loving citizen puts their arm around somebody who hurts and says, how can I help you? What can I do to make your life better?"

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that as of October 2003, government workers were more likely to use computers and the Internet on the job than their private-sector counterparts. Almost 70 percent of workers at all levels of government used computers on the job, and 56 percent reported they used the Internet at work. The computer- and Internet-use rates for
private-sector workers were 53.5 percent and 39.3 percent, respectively. That's partly because more than half of all public sector employees hold management and professional jobs.

But dig a little deeper, and the survey says some interesting things about the federal government. While 67.5 percent of federal employees reported they use computers, that's less than the state government rate (73.5 percent) or that of the private-sector professional and business services industry (68.4 percent). Likewise, when it comes to Internet usage, almost 54 percent of federal employees report they use the Web or e-mail at work, compared to 63.6 in state government and 57.1 percent in private professional and business services.

Bad news for cactus ferruginous pygmy-owls in Arizona: Sorry, but you're just not all that different from other pygmy owls, so no endangered species listing and critical habitat protection for you.

It's come to this: NASA may end up using duct tape to try to fix the space shuttle while in Earth orbit.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is trumpeting the fact that the fatality rate on U.S. highways in 2004 was the lowest since record-keeping began 30 years ago. But as GovExec alumnus Brian Friel pointed out in a recent issue of National Journal, the overall number of deaths on the roads per year has been stuck around the 42,000 level for a decade, leading the administration and Congress to push new safety measures in the massive highway bill. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has set a goal of cutting the annual death toll to around 31,000 in the next three years. With much of the low-hanging fruit in the area of traffic safety already picked--in the form of things like mandatory seat belt laws and tougher drunk-driving penalties--this won't be an easy target to hit.

I'm once again going to play the "Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on this" card to talk about steroids in baseball. Because I can't let Rafael Palmeiro's explanation for why he couldn't possibly have knowingly taken a banned substance go without comment. Here's what Palmeiro said: "Why would I do this in a year when I went before Congress and testified? Why would I do it in a year that I thought might be my last, when I knew I was going to get to 3,000 hits? I had nothing to gain and everything to lose. It makes no sense. I wouldn't put myself or my career on the line like that. I'm not stupid. I'm not a crazy person."

There are two problems with this. Number one, as Rob Dibble pointed out on ESPN Radio this morning, Palmeiro was struggling early in the year, and was in danger of losing his spot in the lineup and jeopardizing his 3,000-hit quest--and, quite possibly, his spot in the Hall of Fame. So it's ridiculous to say that he had "nothing to gain" by trying to give himself a little edge.

Second, even if what he did was monumentally stupid, since when do professional athletes always act rationally? Did it make sense for Kenny Rogers and Randy Johnson to shove people who were filming them at the time? For Ricky Williams to put his financial future at risk to bolt from the Miami Dolphins to lie on the beach? For Ron Artest to jump into the stands and start punching a fan? For Mike Tyson to take a bite out of Evander Holyfield's ear? On the order of about once a week, a professional athlete does something that absolutely defies all reason. Without that, there'd be no sports talk radio. So, sorry, I'm done buying the "I couldn't have done it because it makes no sense" explanation.

Who would've guessed: " New Report Shows That Teens Who Receive Anti-Drug Messages
Are Less Likely to Use Drugs."